SCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC - Christopher Dornan JUNE, 2020 - Public Policy ...
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SCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC Christopher Dornan JUNE, 2020
The Public Policy Forum works with all levels of government and the public service, the private sector, labour, post-secondary institutions, NGOs and Indigenous groups to improve policy outcomes for Canadians. As a non-partisan, member-based organization, we work from “inclusion to conclusion,” by convening discussions on fundamental policy issues and by identifying new options and paths forward. For more than 30 years, the PPF has broken down barriers among sectors, contributing to meaningful change that builds a better Canada. 1400 - 130 rue Albert Ottawa, ON, Canada, K1P 5G4 Tél : 613.238.7858 www.ppforum.ca @ppforumca © 2020, Public Policy Forum ISBN: 978-1-77452-005-5
TABLE OF CONTENTS About the Author 5 Science Disinformation in a Time of Pandemic 7 The Trust Challenge 8 The Stakes 9 Public Understanding of Science 10 Coronavirus Confusion 11 Crossing into Harm 13 Blame Canada 15 Conspiracy World 17 Ungifted Amateurs 19 Free Speech and Reliable Reporting 21 Useful Contrarians 23 Facts and Values 24 The Man in the Mask 25 The Forever War 30 Bibliography 32
THANK YOU TO OUR PARTNERS 4 PUBLIC POLICY FORUM
SCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christopher Dornan teaches at Carleton University where he served for nine
years as director of the School of Journalism and Communication and six
years as director of the Arthur Kroeger College of Public Affairs.
He holds an M.A. in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University
of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in science communication from McGill University.
He taught for two years at Cornell University before joining the faculty at
Carleton in 1987.
CHRISTOPHER
DORNAN He has worked as a reporter for the Edmonton Journal, an editor and editorial
writer for the Ottawa Citizen, and a columnist for The Globe and Mail and
CBC National Radio. In 2006 he was Erasmus Mundus visiting scholar at the Danish School of Journalism and the
University of Århus.
Among other venues, his academic work has appeared in Critical Studies in Communication, the Media Studies
Journal, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Topia, Journalism Studies, and the research reports of The
Royal Commission on Electoral Reform and Party Financing.
He is the co-editor (with Jon Pammett) of The Canadian Federal Election of 2019 (forthcoming, McGill-Queen’s
Press), along with six previous volumes in this series.
He was a principal writer and editor for both volumes of the 2012 government-mandated Aerospace Review (the
Emerson Report), the Canadian Space Agency’s 2014 Space Policy Framework, and the Public Policy Forum’s
2016 report on the state of the Canadian news media, Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital
Age.
His latest work includes the reflection paper “Dezinformatsiya: The Past, Present and Future of ‘Fake News”
(2017), written for the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, and “How to Navigate an Information Media
Environment Awash in Manipulation, Falsehood, Hysteria, Vitriol, Hyper-Partisan Deceit and Pernicious
Algorithms: A Guide for the Conscientious Citizen” (2019), written for the Canadian Committee for World Press
Freedom and the Canadian Commission for UNESCO. Both papers can be downloaded from the Canadian
Commission for UNESCO’s IdeaLab.
He is chair of the board of Reader’s Digest Magazines (Canada).
FORUM DES POLITIQUES PUBLIQUES 5EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The advent of social media has conferred on the public a freedom of expression
and virtual assembly that has transformed contemporary society. In doing so, the
21st century media environment has also given licence to information extremism
and disinformation of all stripes, from the comical to the venomous. Here,
Christopher Dornan examines a specific species of information disorder: content
that adopts the mannerisms of science in order to advocate anti-science.
Science disinformation, he argues, is an especially worrying genre of falsity
because it amounts to an attack on rationality, and therefore on the underpinnings
of informed public policy and good governance. The COVID-19 pandemic provides
a case study to examine specific instances of science disinformation, how these
spread, and the dangers they pose to the public good.
The paper argues that science has long been poorly understood by the greater
public, but while a fascination with pseudoscience predates the rise of social
media, the algorithms of the new media environment reward ever more
outrageous content.
The paper parses different types of COVID-19 disinformation with a view to the
damage these can cause. It considers the responsibilities of the traditional news
media and the social media platforms in a moment of crisis. When does publishing
contrarian views move from helpful fair comment to public endangerment?
Scepticism of science was already building before the pandemic, but recently
appears to have taken on a political inflection. On climate change, vaccination
and COVID-19, some on the right seem perfectly ready to dismiss the scientific
consensus when it conflicts with their political values.
Addressing this, the paper concludes, will require: (1) redoubled engagement
with the social media companies to press them on their public responsibilities;
(2) greater understanding of why science scepticism seems to be aligning
with the political right; (3) a more sophisticated understanding of how science
disinformation uses social media channels to its advantage; and (4) commitment
to a robust and permanent public education campaign so as to counter the social
harms of science disinformation.
6 PUBLIC POLICY FORUMSCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC
SCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A
TIME OF PANDEMIC
In the early months of 2020, as the threat of COVID-19 became evident, the actions of nation states and the
behaviour of entire populations took on a single purpose. One by one, as governments instituted measures
to manage the contagion, they did so on the authority of science. All over the world, and for the first time in
human history, the scientists were in charge of how societies would conduct themselves. Not the generals
or the bankers, not the lawyers or the priests, not the industrialists or the speculators or the partisan
political classes themselves, but virologists, epidemiologists, and infectious disease specialists.
The crisis was born of nature—a dangerous novel coronavirus, highly contagious, to which no one on the
planet yet had immunity—but the global mobilization to address it, an unprecedented exercise in social
control, was undertaken on the insistence of medical empiricists. As they monitored how the virus spread
in Wuhan, its point of origin, and registered how it sickened and killed those who contracted it, they
recognized it as a menace to global health. Uncontained, it would sweep the planet, infecting hundreds
of millions. Unattended, it would overwhelm the capacities of both hospitals and morgues, visit misery on
untold lives and wreak havoc on national economies and the social fabric.
In the absence of a biological fix—a vaccine or effective antiviral drugs—the only measures to mitigate
the crisis were social: altering public space, deforming public interaction, and disrupting the routines of
everyday life so as to inhibit the transmission of the microbe. The populace would have to be schooled to
handwash frequently and not to touch their faces. Shaking hands—in Western societies, that most prosaic
and affable greeting—would have to be made taboo overnight. Schools would be closed, public gatherings
prohibited, and workplaces shut down. People would be required to sequester in their homes and distance
themselves from one another on those self-rationed occasions they ventured out.
In order for these strictures to be effective, they would have to apply equally to everyone not deemed
essential to the maintenance of social order (the so-called front-line workers, from medical personnel to
elderly care providers, transport drivers, hydro repair crews and supermarket cashiers, who would have
to take meticulous precautions so as not to catch or transmit the disease themselves) otherwise the entire
population would be compromised. As John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, a history of the 1918
pandemic, pointed out three years before COVID-19 appeared, “the effectiveness of such interventions will
depend on public compliance, and the public will have to trust what it is being told.”
THE TRUST CHALLENGE
If it were to be managed successfully, the world-wide emergency triggered by the coronavirus would
therefore have to transcend politics. The wholesale restructuring of human conduct, even if only temporary,
FORUM DES POLITIQUES PUBLIQUES 7could not be imposed against the will of the very people
on whose behaviour the protective measures would
Small wonder, then, depend. Because everyone was vulnerable to infection,
that coronavirus and every person who became infected was contagious,
disinformation everyone would have to be convinced to observe the
proliferated. The engines protocols. This would require a massive campaign of
public education and persuasion. National elections
of distrust were already
are also moments of massive, elaborately planned
in place and already
efforts to influence the actions of the population,
primed. but they are inherently and necessarily divisive: they
split the citizenry along partisan lines. In the face of
pandemic what was called for was a public united in a
common cause and confident in the public health authorities. This required crystal-clear messaging about
what everyone had to do, together with compelling explanations of why, along with—no less important—
an appeal to civic duty and a mindfulness of others. The enemies of the effort to manage the crisis were
ignorance and selfishness.
As the progress of the disease changed by the day and from one locality to the next, and as the clinical
understanding of how it behaved and how it attacked the body also evolved with alarming rapidity, it
would be daunting enough to keep an anxious public briefed on what was reliably known, manage the
social response, and maintain calm. But the health communication campaign would also have to labour
against an ongoing eruption of disinformation contrived, either deliberately or inadvertently, to confuse the
public. Whether malicious in design or merely misguided, disinformation aims to convince people not to
believe what they are told by official sources, subject area experts or media outlets responsibly guided by
corroboration and verification. The effect of disinformation is to weaken the hold of those agencies tasked
with providing the public with trustworthy information, or certainly to make their job more difficult.
Disinformation vaulted to prominence during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, when outright lies
circulated via social media so as to favour the candidacy of Donald Trump and discredit the responsible
news media. It became apparent that information malfeasance was a species of malevolent soft power used
by foreign actors, particularly the Kremlin, to undermine the Western democracies through the cunning
manufacture of discontent. The purpose of disinformation was to sow confusion and distrust, exacerbate
division, inflame internal hostilities and so provoke a legitimation crisis whereby essential civic institutions
could no longer command sufficient public trust.
The danger posed by deliberate disinformation, particularly around elections, when the thoughts and
decisions of so many are so consequential, prompted the Western nations to adopt a variety of measures
to guard against the threat. As an indication of how seriously Canada took the threat, in the runup to
the 2019 federal election the government created the Critical Election Incident Public Protocol, designed
8 PUBLIC POLICY FORUMSCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC
to inform the public of any serious assault on the integrity of the election. It created the Security and
Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force, bringing together Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the
Communications Security Establishment, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Global Affairs Canada
to develop awareness of threats to the electoral process, and set up the Foreign Actor Interference
Investigative Team within the RCMP. It took the lead on the G7 Rapid Response Mechanism, coordinating
the monitoring and analysis of threats to the G7 democracies.
The sly, insidious propaganda content of Russia’s RT (formerly Russia Today) cable channel and Sputnik
news agency, along with the disinformation output of Russian troll factories, are perfectly real. But if the
goal is to pit angry citizens against one another, their efforts in the United States are a mere adjunct to a
flourishing homegrown media ecosystem of hyper-partisan outlets dedicated to enraging their audiences
against their ideological enemies—which is to say, their fellow citizens. At the apex of this empire of
animosity is Fox News, for which “the facts” are a pliable medium in the service of the perpetual affirmation
of a triumphalist worldview. But Fox is only the most prominent standard bearer of a strain of political
vehemence that also dominates American AM talk radio and proliferates in digital “political news” sites such
as Breitbart, the Gateway Pundit, the Daily Wire, InfoWars and scores of others.
Here, pseudoscience and baseless conspiracy theories entwine with political vilification. In the world these
sites describe, school shootings are a hoax perpetrated by the state to provide a pretext for gun control; the
weather has been weaponized by the military; the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center were an inside
job; vaccines cause autism; climate change is a myth; condensation trails from jet aircraft are in reality
chemical and biological agents being sprayed by government agencies for purposes of psychological
manipulation; and a sinister “Deep State,” answerable to no one, is at work to strip the citizenry of freedom
of thought and regiment their behaviour. Meanwhile, the lowermost cloisters of the Internet—subreddits,
Gab, message boards and instant messengers such as 4chan, 8kun, Telegram and Discord—seethe with
even more fevered claims, which from time to time bubble up into public view, shrieking for attention.
In addition to its hysterical partisanship, the chief characteristics of this sphere of public discourse are
its suspicion of established authority, its rejection of supposed “expertise,” its paranoid reflex to see
conspiracies at every turn, and its ready embrace of pseudoscience. Small wonder, then, that coronavirus
disinformation proliferated. The engines of distrust were already in place and already primed.
THE STAKES
When untruths circulate in the political arena, it is unfortunate but not unexpected. Politics, after all, is a
contest between competing worldviews, an attempt to persuade the electorate to see the facts in a certain
light. The aim is to win or retain power, and political messaging is merely a means to that end. Politicians
have always exaggerated, bent the truth, smeared their opponents. The worrisome feature of the 2016
U.S. election was not so much the traffic in brazen falsehoods—Pope Francis did not, for example, endorse
FORUM DES POLITIQUES PUBLIQUES 9Donald Trump—as it was the strategic attacks on the traditional news media as themselves untrustworthy.
The effort in that regard was to undermine the legitimacy of the news media, and in doing so disparage the
notion that there are facts that are knowable independent of one’s political convictions. If the news media
could not be trusted to provide reliable, impartial reporting then there was no way to know what to believe
and no rational way to dissuade voters from believing whatever they wanted. The attack on traditional
political journalism as “fake news” was an extension of the derisive dismissal of the “reality-based
community” in 2004 by a senior Bush administration adviser, widely assumed to be Karl Rove. The “reality-
based community” were those who based their judgements on the best available evidence and placed their
faith in scientific and professional expertise—people who, the Bush adviser sneered, “believe that solutions
emerge from … judicious study of discernible reality”—in contrast to those who saw reality as a creation of
political will, and who understood that what matters most is what people can be made to believe.
In the case of coronavirus disinformation, similarly, there was certainly danger in the individual falsehoods
that surged through social media channels, but each erroneous claim or wild fantasy could at least be
addressed and debunked. (It is not that difficult, for example, to persuade people not to drink Javex, no
matter who may have suggested disinfecting the body from the inside.) The greater danger lay in the
accumulation of falsehoods that not only polluted the provision of sound health information but amounted
to a rejection of the counsel and reasoning of the health authorities themselves.
In a moment of collective jeopardy, the real threat was to the underpinnings of a sound public policy
response to the disease. What was at stake was the sway of scientific rationalism.
PUBLIC UNDERSTANDING OF SCIENCE
Ours is a society built by science. How we live the world over—the condition of human existence—owes
itself almost entirely to the methods and findings of scientific investigation, their technological application,
and their industrial production. All that sustains us, all our tools and toys, comes from knowledge of the
natural workings of the animate and inanimate world wrested by empirical investigation and analytical
insight. And yet ours is also a society estranged from science. It would be fair to say that the public, taken
as a whole, does not understand this labour of the human intellect on which so much depends. This is not
just to say that members of the lay public do not grasp the arcana of specialized research fields such as
quantum mechanics or molecular biology (even scientists versed in one field are typically at a loss in other
disciplines). Rather, non-scientists are unclear on the nature of scientific inquiry itself, in no small part
because it has been misrepresented to them.
Science is popularly understood as an avenue to certitude—to knowledge that cannot be otherwise, a
means to reveal an objective reality purged of human prejudice. As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
10 PUBLIC POLICY FORUMSCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC
famously quipped in 2011 on Real Time with Bill Maher, responding to guests on a previous episode who
did not believe in either evolution or climate change, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether
or not you believe in it.” It is a winning and clever line, and it certainly captures the notion that science is
indebted to the evidence rather than to articles of faith or politics, but it nonetheless portrays science as a
storehouse of incontestable truths, when in fact it is the exact opposite.
The crucial feature of scientific findings, unlike articles of faith, is precisely their fallibility. Nothing in science
is ever known absolutely. Science consists of explanations of the natural world that are forever being
disputed, adjusted, rewritten, overthrown. As convinced as we may be today of our scientific certainties, a
century from now they will seem as partial and preliminary, or just plain wrong, as the science of a century
ago appears to us. The good thing about science, then, is not that it is true, but that it is susceptible to
revision. It would be more accurate to say, as the comedy troupe Firesign Theatre titled their 1974 album,
“everything you know is wrong.” The findings of science are not “true”—they are sufficiently reliable as to be
useful, which is not the same thing.
What makes science reliable, or as reliable as is possible, is its institutionalized procedures of contestation.
Every peer review is conducted with a sceptical eye. Every advance in insight is a rebuke to a previous
understanding. Science shares this in common with democratic politics: they are both noisy with perpetual
disagreement.
CORONAVIRUS CONFUSION
Failure to appreciate this aspect of the scientific method invited confusion on the part of the public and
dissent on the part of pundits when, over the course of spring 2020, key data on COVID-19 such its infection
rate and lethality were seemingly in dispute, while different models of how the disease might or might not
progress contradicted one another. The public could be forgiven for suspecting the scientists had gotten
it wrong, when in fact what the public was witnessing was the messy process of science inching toward
getting it right. As Carl Bergstrom, professor of biology at the University of Washington, and co-author
of the forthcoming Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, told the Guardian, “one
of the biggest things that people [in the media] could do to improve would be to recognize that scientific
studies, especially in a fast-moving situation like this, are provisional. That’s the nature of science. Anything
can be corrected. There’s no absolute truth there. Each model, each finding is just adding to a weight of
evidence in one direction or another.”
In the late 20th century, what the public knew of the world was dominated by what used to be called
the mass media. A standard complaint at the time was that the news media paid negligible attention to
science, thus contributing to public alienation from it. When the media did cover science they invariably
focused on “eureka” moments, portraying it as an unending series of intellectual breakthroughs. The result,
communication scholar Leon Trachtman observed, was that “the public image of science tends to be one
FORUM DES POLITIQUES PUBLIQUES 11of a methodical force, ruthless and unstoppable in its logical and rational assault on the problems that face
mankind. To use C.D. Darlington’s analogy, what comes across is a picture of science as a giant steamroller,
‘cracking its problems one by one with even and inexorable force.’” It is a naïve and unrealistic caricature, as
the global effort to understand COVID-19 has revealed.
At the same time, media critics, educators, and prominent scientists worried that a public alienated from
science, and possibly therefore frightened by it, could be hostile to scientific research and technology,
while also susceptible to the allure of pseudoscience. Publications such as The Skeptical Inquirer and public
intellectuals such as Carl Sagan railed against a public fascinated with alien abductions, extrasensory
perception, the healing power of crystals, past life regression, telekinesis, and poltergeist infestation—the
full roster of paranormal phenomena lampooned by the Firesign Theatre in Everything You Know is Wrong,
and what we would today call disinformation.
As generous a soul as Carl Sagan was, there was still something uncharitable about his impatience with
those who had been seduced by pseudoscience. If someone believes in extraterrestrial visitors or the astral
plane or that Stonehenge is a transmitter station for psychic energy, where is the harm? These beliefs
may provide comfort, meaning, and mystery to the people who hold them. In a liberal democracy, what is
promised is freedom of thought. Nowhere is it written that everyone’s thinking has to be rational.
As for a public suspicious of science, a measure of suspicion about a social force of such consequence is
surely altogether prudent. Scientific research has populated our lives with products and capabilities that are
wondrous and beneficial, but the industrial application of science has also led to misfortune and damage.
Plastics were a boon when they were invented more than a century ago, for example, but their overuse has
come with considerable cost. Science itself claims to be apolitical, its investigations beholden to nothing
but the empirical evidence, and yet the investigative agenda is clearly shot through with political import.
There are still basement tinkerers, but overwhelmingly scientific research is conducted at universities, by
the military or in the R&D labs of corporations. Academic research may be motivated solely by intellectual
curiosity, but applied research is carried out in the interests of power and profit.
Meanwhile, the media environment of the 21st century, marked by the ascendance of the social media
platforms and the eclipse of the traditional mass media, has transformed how science presents to the
public even as it has provided the proponents of anti-science and pseudoscience with a global platform to
expound their views and enlist adherents.
The Internet has extended the reach of established science publications such as Scientific American, New
Scientist and Discover magazine, while also bringing into being a host of niche websites, podcasts, blogs
and YouTube channels that make science their subject matter, such as I Fucking Love Science, Space.
com, Stat, Live Science, Neurologica and PLOS (the Public Library of Science). But these are all sources
of science coverage that cater to a minority already attentive to developments in science. Weigh this
12 PUBLIC POLICY FORUMSCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC
against the popularity of a program such as Ancient Aliens, which retails the fiction that the architectural
accomplishments of antiquity, such as the pyramids of Giza or the Mayan empire, were built with the
technological assistance of superior extraterrestrial intelligence. Ancient Aliens is now in its 10th year on the
History channel.
The series is an insult to the peoples who actually built these structures as well as to the disciplines of
archeology and anthropology. Not so long ago, its argument would have been confined to the cultural
margins as a bemusing example of imaginations run wild. Today, it has a prime-time slot on a continent-
wide cable channel ostensibly devoted to the history of human societies. It is not only a specimen of
pseudoscience but of faux journalism: it mimics the conventions of legitimate television documentary
series—location shooting mixed with commentary from “expert” talking heads, all sutured together by an
omniscient narrator—in order to cloak its preposterous claims in a shroud of authenticity.
It may be fun to speculate that human history is indebted to the interventions of alien life forms, just as
ghost stories are fun, but if even mainstream TV happily airs programming openly contemptuous of the
work of genuine scholars, imagine what circulates on social media, where attention is the metric of success,
self-worth and validation. Social media reward information extremism because the emotional heat of
controversy and vitriol readily generate engagement, while their algorithms steer users toward content in a
similar vein. You clicked on that link about how the Earth is flat? Perhaps you will be interested in this post
about how the Earth is hollow. You watched that video about how the moon landings never happened?
Here’s one about how the Large Hadron Collider is an attempt to open a portal to Hell.
CROSSING INTO HARM
Social media abound in pseudoscience content, but again much of this is harmless. If someone wants to
spend their time sifting through NASA images of the surface of Mars, looking for evidence of alien artefacts
in the shadows of rock formations, what of it? However, social media have also allowed quite vicious
constituencies to coalesce and reinforce one another, from anti-Muslim bigots to Islamic extremists; from
white supremacists to incel misogynists. Here, the freedom of expression promised by liberal democracy
collides with the imperative to protect against harm.
Prior to COVID-19, the most prominent use of social media to spread genuinely harmful science
disinformation and mobilize against the public health authorities was the anti-vaccination movement.
Immunization not only protects those who are inoculated but also protects those who cannot be, such
as infants, or people whose immune systems are compromised, such as cancer patients undergoing
chemotherapy. If the bulk of the population is immunized against it, a pathogen cannot find hosts, cannot
spread through the community, and so never has an opportunity to come into contact with the vulnerable.
Necessary levels of immunization depend on the disease: for the measles vaccine to be effective some 90
to 95% of the population must be vaccinated; for polio, a less contagious disease, the figure is 80 to 85%.
FORUM DES POLITIQUES PUBLIQUES 13If, however, a sufficient number of people refuse to be vaccinated, the pathogen can find pathways to stay
alive in the population. It can propagate; it can run rampant. The anti-vaccination movement is socially
harmful because it not only places at risk those who refuse inoculation. It endangers those who, in a caring
society, should be afforded the utmost protection: the very young, the infirm and the vulnerable.
Vaccine scepticism is a form of aggressive resistance to public authority, but it is of quite a different order
from militancy founded in venom. Parents who refuse to vaccinate their children because they genuinely
believe vaccines may cause harm are mistaken, but they are acting out of love. They are simply, though
misguidedly, trying to protect their children. They are not evil. They are merely irrational.
This is what is at stake when disinformation that undercuts science circulates unchallenged. When one
ignores or dismisses the findings of science, one also rejects the processes that led to those findings, and
those processes are called reason. Science is not an avenue to absolute truth. It is a way of addressing and
apprehending the natural world. It is a means of thinking, or, rather, a way to organize analytical thought.
It sets out what counts as evidence, how that evidence should be assessed, and what conclusions are
thereby justified. The anti-vaccination movement and the Ancient Aliens aficionados are irrational because
they refuse to accept the best available evidence and reject the principles of sound reasoning by which the
evidence is weighed and interpreted.
One can therefore act in what one believes to be a moral manner, as the vaccine sceptics do, and still be
wrong, just as it is possible to grasp the facts and still behave immorally. Science may provide reliable
explanations of how the natural world works, but this knowledge in itself does not dictate what should be
done with it.
For example, a thorough understanding of the biological
processes by which a human sperm fertilizes an egg and the
resulting zygote goes on to become a fetus has almost no bearing
on whether one should defend abortion as a woman’s right or
oppose it as a form of murder. In the case of the emergence
of COVID-19, the virologists and epidemiologists could speak
with confidence about the damage the disease would do and
they were able to recommend measures that would manage
Science is not an avenue to absolute truth. It is a way of
addressing and apprehending the natural world. It is a means
of thinking, or, rather, a way to organize analytical thought.
14 PUBLIC POLICY FORUMSCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC
its transmission so as to lessen its impact, but the decision to implement those measures was ultimately
political, taken on the principle that the moral priority should be to do everything possible to save lives.
One could imagine a different society, in which other considerations might be given greater weight. Indeed,
by May 2020 it was no longer necessary to imagine this hypothetical alternative society. It was showing
itself to be the United States of America.
BLAME CANADA
In late January, a story surfaced that the virus that causes COVID-19 was smuggled out of Canada’s
National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg by Chinese scientists who spirited it to the Wuhan Institute
of Virology in China where it was weaponized; the virus subsequently escaped the containment facility to
wreak havoc on the world. By the end of April, according to NewsGuard, a New York-based non-partisan
agency that monitors the veracity of digital information and runs a Coronavirus Misinformation Tracking
Centre, this was the number one COVID-19 myth circulating over the Internet.
Its origins could be traced back to July 2019 when two Chinese-born married scientists working at the
National Microbiology Laboratory—one of whom, Xiangguo Qiu, had won a Governor General’s Innovation
Award in 2018 for her work on a treatment for Ebola—were summarily escorted from the premises, while
the RCMP opened an investigation. That incident remains unresolved, but it provided the pretext for a
story on an obscure Indian website, GreatGameIndia.com, which claims to be a “Journal on Geopolitics and
International Relations.”
Under the headline “Coronavirus Bioweapon—how China stole coronavirus from Canada and weaponized
it,” the story recounted that in 2012 a 60-year-old Saudi man was admitted to hospital suffering from a
respiratory ailment. An Egyptian virologist supposedly identified the patient as infected with a previously
unknown coronavirus and sent a sample to the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. The Dutch then sent
a sample of the virus to Dr. Frank Plummer –then scientific director of the National Microbiology Laboratory
in Winnipeg—from where, according to the story, it was stolen by the Chinese scientists now under
investigation. Dr. Plummer, who was a mentor to Dr. Theresa Tam, currently Canada’s Chief Public Health
Officer, died in February when he collapsed at a meeting at the University of Nairobi. GreatGameIndia
insists he was assassinated, a week after it published its story.
NewsGuard’s Gabby Deutch, writing in Wired, notes that the original story received only 1,600
likes, shares or comments on social media until it was reposted by ZeroHedge, an alt-right site that
traffics in conspiracies about economic collapse and that fulminated against Hunter Biden during the
2019 impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. The ZeroHedge story was then reposted by
RedStateWatcher.com, a pro-Trump site with an even larger reach. Here in Canada, Toronto Sun columnist
Tarek Fatah tweeted a link to the ZeroHedge story to his 643,000 followers. From there it went viral on
FORUM DES POLITIQUES PUBLIQUES 15reddit, Twitter and Facebook.
By now we are This is a textbook example of how disinformation works.
all aware of the Threads of truth—the Chinese scientists were indeed
breathtaking range of escorted from the most secure biocontainment facility in
Canada, whose former scientific director did die in Kenya
mistaken, misleading,
in February—are stitched together and embroidered to
fabricated, and
produce a yarn laced with intrigue and threat and suspense.
outright unhinged This particular yarn makes conspiracists of its readers, who
content prompted by are invited to follow along with a complicated narrative
the pandemic. whose ultimate message is that you are not being told the
truth.
The fact that the story first made its appearance in a little-known but seemingly legitimate source—a journal
of international affairs in a country half a world away, not some clickbait outlet trolling for attention—
only lends it credibility. The story itself is dotted with content from reputable sources so as to bolster its
authenticity: it includes a video clip from CBC’s The National on the Chinese scientists being removed from
the Winnipeg facility; a photo of Xiangguo Qiu is credited to Health Canada.
The story is then “discovered” by an American partisan site with a readership all too eager to hear that
the Chinese are to blame; that the Chinese are nefarious because they stole a deadly pathogen and
purposely made it more lethal, but incompetent in that they allowed the microbe to escape containment;
that America’s allies are untrustworthy given how easily they were duped by Chinese bio-warfare agents,
and are therefore themselves threats to U.S. security. The story is then picked up and trumpeted by
other partisan outlets who amplify its reach, and the repetition across multiple sources seems to offer
corroboration, despite being just a mirror effect of the original fabrication being relayed and repackaged.
By then the story has seized the attention of thousands of individuals, who take up the job of spreading it
exponentially via social media.
Apart from the fact that it originated with GreatGameIndia, there is almost no way to determine the
story’s provenance. It carries no byline and GreatGameIndia ignored repeated requests for comment
from NewsGuard. Are we to assume that some conspiratorially minded writer at GreatGameIndia with
a hyperactive imagination pieced all this together in the genuine belief that it revealed the dark truth
behind how COVID-19 began and that the world needed to be told? It is perfectly possible: the new media
environment teems with elaborate conspiracy content dreamed up by obsessive minds with time on
their hands. Or was this story deliberately crafted by disinformation actors, either partisan ideologues or
backroom state operatives, so as to whip up outrage at the Chinese government for unleashing a global
pandemic? Is GreatGameIndia a front, a phony publication created and funded for the express purpose of
seeding stories like this? Is this entire episode an example of clandestine information warfare carried out in
16 PUBLIC POLICY FORUMSCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC
plain view? How could we know one way or the other?
And how does one combat content like this? More specifically in this case, how should Canada react?
Terse denials from the Public Health Agency of Canada, which runs the National Microbiology Laboratory,
are not likely to be noticed by those who avidly want to believe the story, but to spend time and energy
aggressively refuting its claims would only reward it with greater attention.
CONSPIRACY WORLD
In any case, this was only one ember in a firestorm of coronavirus misinformation. By now we are all aware
of the breathtaking range of mistaken, misleading, fabricated, and outright unhinged content prompted
by the pandemic. There are those who believe it was created by Bill Gates as a pretext for a compulsory
mass vaccination plan to be used as a cover to inject digital tracking devices in every living human, and so
impose a worldwide caste system. Some believe COVID-19 symptoms are a form of “mass injury” caused
by 5G telecommunications technology, which has weakened the population’s immune system. Others insist
the pandemic is a deliberate ploy to allow the authorities to install 5G infrastructure under cover of the
social isolation lockdown. Still others are convinced that there is no pandemic, that it is all a gargantuan
hoax designed to impose martial law and bring liberty to an end, or to wreak havoc on the capitalist
system, or to entrench the subservience of the population to a grim economic order, or to depose Donald
Trump. A survey of Canadians conducted in early May by the School of Journalism and Communication
at Carleton University in conjunction with Abacus Data found that more than half of respondents (57%)
were confident that they could easily identify conspiracy theories and misinformation about COVID-19,
even as a quarter of them believed that the virus was engineered as a bioweapon in a Chinese laboratory,
11% believed the disease was being spread to cover up the effects of 5G “radiation,” and 23% believed
that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for those who contract the illness. FullFact.org, an
independent British fact checking organization, has compiled an exhaustive list of the various forms
coronavirus disinformation and denial have taken—a palette wheel of paranoia.
Things have become so convoluted and confused that the British government was compelled to formally
deny claims that its Department of Health and Social Care had set up a network of bot Twitter accounts in
support of government policy as part of a covert plan to manipulate the national conversation on COVID-19.
In effect, the British government had to publicly insist it was fake news that it was running fake Twitter
accounts to post fake pro-government coronavirus messages. The U.S. State Department, meanwhile,
issued a report concluding that China, Iran and Russia were all pushing disinformation narratives against the
United States, which they clearly were. However, included as examples of this “disinformation” were claims
that the U.S. was using the crisis to malign its enemies, and that the U.S. response to the pandemic had
been inadequate. So, lamentable home truths were categorized as deliberate foreign lies, and a report on
disinformation against the U.S. became a means to push U.S. disinformation.
FORUM DES POLITIQUES PUBLIQUES 17To anyone with responsibility for managing public health messaging during the pandemic, the
inexhaustibility of false counter-messaging could not help but be itself exhausting. Officials in the Privy
Council Office, Global Affairs Canada, Health Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada described
to me the enormous effort that goes into crafting sound and reliable public information on a daily basis
that stays current with ever-changing circumstances and accommodates regional differences; that must
be coordinated across federal ministries and with provincial, territorial, and local health officers; and that
requires liaising with foreign partners on best practices and mutual support. This involves marshalling the
skills of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of conscientious public servants under strained circumstances where
they are all working remotely. And yet all that is required to spread misinformation or to argue publicly
against trust in the health authorities is a recalcitrant mind and a social media account.
Some forms of disinformation are comparatively easy to identify. People who are unsettled and anxious
may be vulnerable to hucksters selling quack remedies and scam artists looking to gain access to banking
and credit card information. While Health Canada has been monitoring for this type of criminality, the
Communications Security Establishment has been taking action against fake websites that impersonate
health agencies or the government itself, and that try to lure people into clicking on web links or opening
email attachments that can then give access to users’ personal data.
While no one would fault the authorities for taking down criminally fraudulent content, other forms of
disinformation present thornier issues. Claire Wardle is the co-founder of First Draft, an American non-
profit dedicated to educating journalists about reporting in an environment of information disorder, which
compiles a daily digest of stories on coronavirus misinformation from around the world. She has argued that
in the early days of COVID-19 the bulk of misinformation was more misguided than malevolent.
It took the form of people posting gossip and hearsay via social messaging channels: crackpot treatments
such as pointing a hair dryer up one’s nose, confusion about how the virus spreads and how long it can
survive on surfaces, urban rumours in the form of anecdotes (“My friend’s sister works in a hospital…”). “It’s
mostly people being terrified,” Wardle said in March, “and many of them are living at home by themselves.
People need community and connection, so they’re turning to each other.” This sort of thing should hardly
be the subject of any policing action beyond gentle correction. Kate Starbird, a computer scientist at the
University of Washington and co-founder of the university’s Center for an Informed Public, expresses
qualms about social media platforms trying to expunge this type of innocent, but misguided content: “I
want to be careful about punishing people for sharing rumors or misinformation,” Starbird told Science. “I
don’t think the platforms should do that. We see that in authoritarian states. It’s so important that people
feel that they can share information, and sometimes they’re going to get it wrong. It’s a real balance there,
and there are some really hard trade-offs.”
18 PUBLIC POLICY FORUMSCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC
UNGIFTED AMATEURS
But what if the misinformation is genuinely harmful, or designed to undermine the measures put in place
to stem the pandemic? What actions can be taken against it, by whom, and with what warrant? As the
pandemic wore on, the challenges to public confidence in the health authorities moved from the margins
to the mainstream, and the methods by which misinformation came to public attention evolved. “It’s
the ‘influencers’ who really cause the problems that have significant impact,” Wardle told the Columbia
Journalism Review in May. “If no-one shared or amplified the conspiracies, rumours and falsehoods, we
wouldn’t have a disinformation problem. Those who are trying to peddle disinformation are looking to
convince those with the largest ‘megaphones’ to repeat the falsehoods. This is why celebrities, online
influencers and politicians are targeted with certain messages.”
In addition, much of the content muddying health communication messaging has not come from malign
foreign actors or the ravings of cranks, but from presumptuous amateurs who believe they know better
than the scientific community and the health authorities. For example, on March 20, Medium, the online
blogging platform founded by Evan Williams, the former CEO of Twitter, published an article titled
“Evidence over hysteria—COVID-19.” Freighted with graphs and data analysis, the piece argued that the
political and social response to the pandemic, inflamed by the news media, was panicked, heavy handed,
unnecessary and would ultimately lead to more harm than good. According to Kate Starbird the article was
mentioned in only a few hundred tweets until it was recommended by Fox News personality Brit Hume to
his 1.2 million Twitter followers as “definitely worth reading. Smart analysis.” In short order, the link to the
article was tweeted by Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier; conservative conspiracy theorist and
political provocateur James O’Keefe; Sebastian Gorka, former Trump White House adviser; Steven Crowder,
right wing YouTube personality; Kirk Herbstreit, ESPN football commentator; and Laura Ingraham of Fox
News. Within 24 hours the article had been mentioned in more than 15,000 tweets and received 2.6 million
views on Medium.
Although the piece found favour with outspoken conservative media celebrities who magnified its reach, it
also attracted the attention of epidemiologists, infections disease specialists and public health managers—
the people it was describing as wrong-headed in how they were managing the crisis—who promptly decried
its analysis as juvenile and amateurish, and its policy prescriptions as disastrous. The author, Aaron Ginn, is
not a medical specialist. He is a Silicon Valley “technologist” and right-wing agitator. In the face of criticism
from experts, Medium did not want to be seen to be endorsing a polemic that epidemiologists insisted was
not only ignorant but dangerously so. The platform deleted the article on March 22, some 32 hours after it
had been published.
And yet by de-platforming the piece, Medium inevitably made it more notorious. Free speech advocates
howled that suppressing alternative views simply because—or especially because—they run counter to
the prevailing consensus is anathema to the principles of liberty of expression. The editorial board of the
FORUM DES POLITIQUES PUBLIQUES 19Wall Street Journal argued that Medium’s decision amounted to an attempt to “stamp out the free debate
that helped alert Americans to the threat of the virus in the first place,” while the National Review argued
that “the lockdown debate requires transparent disagreement.” Even one of the article’s most prominent
critics, University of Washington biologist Carl Bergstrom, argued against censoring it: “as wholeheartedly
as I disagree with the piece,” he tweeted, “I’m not all convinced that this is preferable to leaving it up and
allowing open discussion.”
Of course, Medium’s decision to take the article down did not mean that it disappeared. It is currently
hosted by ZeroHedge, the alt-right site that first posted the GreatGameIndia article about how COVID-19
was stolen from a Canadian lab. De-platforming can be a badge of honour among the conspiracy
set: it becomes evidence that the content contains a truth the authorities are desperate to silence.
GreatGameIndia, for example, claims proudly that its coronavirus theft story “has caused a major
international controversy and is suppressed actively by a section of mainstream media.”
Just as the GreatGameIndia article presented itself as a piece of investigative journalism, Ginn’s Medium
essay presented itself as a work of scientific analysis that just so happened to argue that the scientific
experts were wrong. It adopted the trappings of science in order to promote a viewpoint fundamentally
at odds with the consensus of the epidemiological community. As Richard Hofstader observed in “The
Paranoid Style in American Politics,” his keenly perceptive 1964 essay, “One of the impressive things about
paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern for
factuality it inevitably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the
only thing that can be believed.”
Ginn’s article was merely the most prominent example
of a type. As Jeet Heer of the Nation quipped on Twitter,
When does publishing “On top of everything else, there’s an epidemic of
contrarian or sceptical Medium posts.” A continent in lockdown gave rise to
reams of analysis by smart people (or people who believe
views move from
themselves to be smart) opining on matters they know very
fair comment into
little about, a development parodied in a post published
irresponsibility, or on Medium, ironically enough, the day before Ginn’s
from irresponsible to article appeared, titled “Flatten the Curve of Armchair
genuinely harmful? Epidemiology,” in which the authors claimed to have
diagnosed “DKE-19, a highly contagious illness threatening
the response against COVID-19.” DKE-19 is named after the
20 PUBLIC POLICY FORUMSCIENCE DISINFORMATION IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC
Dunning-Kruger Effect, “a phenomenon where people lack the ability to understand their lack of ability…
Symptoms vary, but include extreme claims, making charts, and publishing on Medium. Although most
cases are mild or even entirely asymptomatic, the recent outbreak indicates that severe DKE-19 primarily
affects men ages 24–36 working in tech, for reasons unknown to scientists who are unaccountably also
men.”
FREE SPEECH AND RELIABLE REPORTING
The dilemma faced by Medium in the case of Ginn’s article has been playing itself out across both the
traditional media and the social media companies. When does publishing contrarian or sceptical views move
from fair comment into irresponsibility, or from irresponsible to genuinely harmful? On March 9, the Globe
and Mail provided a platform to Dr. Richard Schabas, a retired physician who was for 10 years Ontario’s
Chief Medical Officer of Health, publishing an op-ed article in which he argued against the coronavirus
containment protocols put in place all over the West. “Is COVID-19 a global crisis?” he asked. “Certainly
for people who can’t add.” As to the measures being implemented on the advice of medical expertise,
“Quarantine,” he scoffed, “belongs back in the Middle Ages.” On March 22 he appeared on CBC News to
argue, again, that Western governments were massively overreacting to the virus. Almost immediately, CBC
removed links to the interview from its website, although it can still be accessed via Yahoo News Canada.
Social media companies have been notoriously loath to police the content that moves over their platforms.
They have insisted they are mechanisms of social connectivity, optimized to provide people with a means of
expression, and create no content themselves. Therefore, they argue, they are neither media companies nor
publishers, and should no more be held accountable for how people use their technologies than the phone
companies can be held liable for the conversations that flow through their wires and via their cell towers.
Faced with a global emergency, however, and the prospect that their platforms could be used to inflict real-
life harm, the companies became attuned to their social responsibilities in exceptional circumstances.
Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (owned by Google) all announced measures to stifle the spread of
coronavirus misinformation and direct attention instead to trustworthy, official sources. Facebook, for
example, launched new initiatives pushing users toward trustworthy and accurate health content while
eliminating disinformation content that would lead to imminent physical harm, as per pre-existing content
policies. It launched a Coronavirus (COVID-19) Information Hub to collate sound information and advice
from the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and national health bodies such as the Public Health Agency
of Canada. It prioritized official sources in its algorithms, so that a search for coronavirus would direct the
user to a pop-up for the WHO or a link to the official PHAC page. At the same time, it moved to remove
content that international and national health agencies determined would unequivocally lead to harm,
such as quack cures or claims that social distancing is ineffective, and to send notifications to users who
had interacted with such content before it was taken down, directing them to a WHO “mythbusters” page.
Other content identified as false by Facebook’s third-party fact checkers would be flagged as such and
FORUM DES POLITIQUES PUBLIQUES 21downgraded by the algorithms that determined what users would see in their feeds in an attempt to inhibit
the spread of disinformation.
Critics complained that these measures were insufficient; that the measures could not keep up with the
flood of content coursing over the platforms; that removing only material that would lead to physical harm
left an ocean of egregious content still in circulation. For example, a study by University of Ottawa and
Carleton University researchers published in BMJ Global Health examined 69 of the top YouTube videos
on COVID-19 or coronavirus, and found that 27.5% of them contained misleading information, from racist
statements to conspiracy theories about how the pharmaceutical companies already have a cure for
the disease. Nonetheless, the move toward managing an otherwise all but unregulated sphere of social
discourse marked a significant shift in the practices of the social media giants. As YouTube pointed out in
response to the BMJ article, the study neglected to take into account how the platform has taken down
thousands of videos containing coronavirus disinformation and “directed tens of billions of impressions to
global and local health organizations from our home page and information panels.”
The traditional news media, meanwhile, already diminished versions of what they had once been, were
further hammered financially as advertising revenue disappeared because of the lockdown, just at the
moment when they were most needed, when people were looking to them for reliable information about
the pandemic. Studies have shown that in moments of crisis or emergency the public turns to the news
sources they most trust, and the pandemic is no exception. The spring update for the 2020 Edelman Trust
Barometer shows a worldwide 7% jump in trust in traditional media—by far the most trusted information
source—in the space of four months, from January to May.
“The search for reliable information related to the pandemic has driven trust in news
sources to an all-time high,” the report notes. “There is a strong public demand for expert
voices, as people want to hear from the most trusted sources of information on the
pandemic: doctors (80%), scientists (79%) and national health officials (71%).” The report
also cautions that “Concerns about fake news still loom large, with 67% of respondents
worried about false and inaccurate information being spread about the virus.”
Participants at a Harvard colloquium in late April complained that U.S. media coverage of the crisis was
marred by reporters with no medical or public health training. “Because many are not yet knowledgeable
enough to report critically and authoritatively on the science,” wrote the Harvard Gazette, “they can
sometimes lean too heavily on traditional journalism values like balance, novelty, and conflict. In doing
so, they lift up outlier and inaccurate counterarguments and hypotheses.” We shall have to wait until
after the fact to definitively assess how well the Canadian news media reported on the pandemic,
but impressionistically the reporting on it in the major Canadian news media has been exemplary—
professional, conscientious, and valuable. The Canadian Institute of Health Information is an independent
non-profit organization that provides a range of evidence and data to inform public health policy, and as
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